guise" upon the streets of great towns, amongst a kind of life they
are little used to. There is something very touching, too, in their
manner and appearance. They may be ill-shod and footsore; they may
be hungry, and sick at heart, and forlorn in countenance, but they
are almost always clean and wholesome-looking in person. They come
singing in twos and threes, and sometimes in more numerous bands, as
if to keep one another in countenance. Sometimes they come in a
large family all together, the females with their hymn-books, and
the men with their different musical instruments,--bits of pet
salvage from the wrecks of cottage homes. The women have sometimes
children in their arms, or led by the hand; and they sometimes carry
music-books for the men. I have seen them, too, with little
handkerchiefs of rude provender for the day. As I said before, they
are almost invariably clean in person, and their clothing is almost
always sound and seemly in appearance, however poor and scanty.
Amongst these poor wanderers there is none of the reckless personal
negligence and filth of hopeless reprobacy; neither is there a
shadow of the professional ostentation of poverty amongst them.
Their faces are sad, and their manners very often singularly shame-
faced and awkward; and any careful observer would see at a glance
that these people were altogether unused to the craft of the trained
minstrel of the streets. Their clear, healthy complexion, though
often touched with pallor, their simple, unimportunate demeanour,
and the general rusticity of their appearance, shows them to be

"Suppliants who would blush
To wear a tatter'd garb, however coarse;
Whom famine cannot reconcile to filth;
Who ask with painful shyness, and refused,
Because deserving, silently retire."